There is an occupational hazard to doing this job for nine years, which is that I cannot read a badly organized document anymore without some part of my brain quietly rewriting it, even when the document in question is a board game rulebook and nobody in the room asked for my professional opinion. This happened two Thursdays ago. We were three rounds into a new game, an argument broke out over whether a specific ability triggered before or after a scoring step, somebody grabbed the rulebook to settle it, and within about four sentences of reading the relevant section out loud I understood exactly why we were arguing. The rule wasn’t ambiguous because we’re bad at games. It was ambiguous because whoever wrote it buried the actual trigger condition in a subordinate clause two sentences after the sentence that should have contained it.

I did not say any of that out loud, at first. I just quietly reread the paragraph three times, found the actual answer, gave it to the table, and we moved on. But something had already switched on in my head and it did not switch back off for the rest of the night. Every time a new rule came up I found myself doing the thing I do professionally, checking whether a term was defined before or after it was first used, noticing that “may” and “must” were doing inconsistent work two pages apart, the kind of thing that makes a manuscript hard to trust even when the underlying content is fine. A rulebook is a legal document wearing a friendly font, is what I’ve decided, and most of them are edited by people who love the game and are not necessarily the same people who should be deciding where a comma goes.

The part I actually want to admit here, because it’s a little embarrassing, is that I went home and marked the whole booklet up anyway. Not for anyone, not to send to the publisher, just because I couldn’t stop once I’d started, red pen and all, the exact process I use on an actual manuscript, applied to twenty four pages of a hobby I’m not even being paid to think about this hard. Marcus, who was there for the original argument, thinks this is the funniest thing I’ve ever confessed to him, and he has now started sending me photos of rulebook typos he finds specifically to see if I’ll say something. I always do.

What actually gets me is that I don’t think this is really about the rulebook. I think nine years of the same kind of close, patient, unglamorous attention has just become the shape my brain defaults to when it hits an unclear sentence, whether that sentence is explaining a corporate merger in a manuscript I’m being paid real money to fix, or explaining when a scorpion token flips over in a game I paid sixty dollars for on a Tuesday. I used to think that was a little sad, work leaking into the thing that’s supposed to be the opposite of work. Lately I think it’s just what happens when you’re actually good at noticing something. It doesn’t turn off because you left the desk.